Navy's tougher littoral ship would still be vulnerable, GAO says

[jpak]

Source: Stars and Stripes

Confronted with concerns that its lightweight Littoral Combat Ship may not survive combat, the U.S. Navy promised a better-armed version that's more like a frigate. It would still fall short, congressional auditors say.

"While the Navy's proposed frigate will offer some improvements over LCS, it will not result in significant improvements in survivability" because it "will still be based on a hybrid of commercial and Navy shipbuilding specifications," the Government Accountability Office said in a draft report obtained by Bloomberg News.

In the report labeled "For Official Use Only," the GAO recommended that Congress consider not funding any Littoral Combat Ships for fiscal 2017 "because of unresolved concerns with lethality and survivability, the Navy's lack of requested funding to make needed improvements and the current schedule performance of the shipyards" where Lockheed Martin Corp. and Austal Ltd. build different versions of the vessel.

But congressional support for the ship, and the shipbuilding jobs it provides, remains strong. While the Pentagon requested funding for two ships in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, the House Armed Services Committee added a third in H.R. 4909, the defense policy bill that's being debated on the House floor this week. The House Appropriations did the same in the defense spending measure it approved Tuesday.

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Read more: http://www.stripes.com/news/navy/navy-s-tougher-littoral-ship-would-still-be-vulnerable-gao-says-1.410095

[Delver Rootnose]

1. The US has....

...enough money to end hunger, fix the roads and bridges and educate our people and even reduce the debt. What we don't have is a will to do it. We have to pay for a military to pacify the world for business reasons, businesses that no longer consider themselves American and even if they do they certainly don't pay taxes to support it.

[Ghost Dog]

2. Why not buy some of these potentially fine frigates, with a license

to build (and modify if you like) some over there?



https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Combat_Ship

[jmowreader]

3. Better idea

Buy more Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which have two advantages: they're cheap and they work.

[Ghost Dog]

6. I wouldn't argue with that, suitably modernized,

except in the context of shallower-waters duties...

[jmowreader]

14. And that's where we run into problems

They're trying to do too damn much with the hull they want to use. "Hey! Let's build a ship with a 16-foot draft and arm it like it was a ship with a 40-foot draft!" Problem is, if you mount all the weapons and electronics they want, you have to make the hull as thin as a beer can to get the weight down.

[maxsolomon]

4. Combat with whom? Iranian speedboats? Aliens?

Was it designed to be indestructible?

When was our last Naval Battle with Russia or China?

[Ghost Dog]

7. When was our last Naval Battle with Russia or China?

Well, looks like the Chiefs are working to soon achieve the next (or, the first, in both cases).

[IronLionZion]

12. Somalia? Libya?

It sounds like the Navy is planning to use it in North Africa.

[Ford_Prefect]

5. This week they added 1 more test ship to the bill, it will be 5 by the time it passes.

That's the way the arms jobs go in congress.

Even though most ships are quite vulnerable to modern attack, as the sinking of the Belgrano and Sheffield at the Falklands showed, they keep trying to pretend you can hide anything larger than a PT Boat.

I think that since most ships operate on the surface and must disturb it as they move therefore they will always be detectable and targetable in some degree. They are not as stealthy as aircraft can be.

I am not against improving the ships the Navy must use. I have my doubts about how far they can reasonably go. It might make more sense to build a good set of conventional ships, and spend the savings on diplomatic approaches and public schools instead.

[Ghost Dog]

8. What about nautical drones?

(Serious question).

[TipTok]

9. In the pipeline...

... but not at that scale.

[Ghost Dog]

10. No, indeed. Reductions in scale, increased stealth,

sufficient (potential, hopefully well-controlled) lethality, no crew in immediate harm's way would be considered to be, um, advantageous, I guess.

Genuine diplomacy, mutual understanding, non-imperialism, cooperation are first priorities, imho. But the big stick is also unfortunately necessary, on all sides.

[Ford_Prefect]

11. They are doing sea trials now on just such an idea. It does independent anti-Sub patrol.

ATM it isn't armed and there are questions about overall durability in high seas.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/military-tests-worlds-largest-unmanned-surface-vessel/

I haven't read anything about attack drone boats of any size yet but who knows what else DARPA and the other agencies are dreaming about. In essence the torpedo and the guided missile are attack drones of a sort. I don't see either one as capable of boarding and searching a cargo vessel, or patrolling the South China sea or the Red sea for pirates, for instance. Different naval ships have evolved to do various tasks but they all were originally floating artillery scaled to different purposes, speeds and opponents.

Part of the size of a military ship is determined by what scale of sea it must encounter to do the job. Part of the size is determined by how much weapons, amunition, technology and crew it needs to carry do the job. One complication that ships have which aircraft do not is the mass of the ocean and how it moves around. Potentially surface vessels can encounter far larger tidal forces at work and larger liquid mass to account for in steering and coping with the winds than are typical for aircraft. Aircraft may be grounded or rerouted due to strong weather. A ship out of port has nowhere to hide from severe waves and wind.

[Ghost Dog]

13. Yeah. "the mass of the ocean and how it moves around":

You're not f*cking joking.